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Whether you’re designing a sales enablement strategy from scratch or refining one already in place, it can be difficult to develop a winning strategy. A foolproof sales enablement strategy will help you encourage cross-functional collaboration between sales and marketing teams, use the right enablement software, enhance pipeline performance, and ultimately drive sustainable revenue growth.
For your strategy to be aligned with your sales enablement goals, you’ll have to put certain structures in place. For example, you must define sales enablement for all roles within your sales team or build a tech stack specific to your enablement needs. A sales enablement strategy requires structure and clarity, so you must be clear on what to do, who does what, and how it will be done.
Businesses with effective sales enablement strategies see a 49% win rate on deals compared to those without. If you want to build a winning strategy but are unsure how to go about it, keep reading this article. You’ll learn the components of a successful sales enablement strategy, how to develop one, and how to ensure it is customized to your business's needs.
What is a Sales Enablement Strategy?
A sales enablement strategy answers the what and how of sales enablement. It is the iterative methods you put in place to accurately determine what sales enablement materials to give sales teams at every stage of the sales pipeline and how to enable reps to use those materials effectively.
When implementing a sales enablement process, tracking everything that needs to be done can be complicated and overwhelming, i.e., creating sales enablement content, training, and coaching sales reps, building the right tech stack, etc. A sales enablement strategy helps you track progress and deviations from defined goals.
Why is a Sales Enablement Strategy Important?
According to Gartner, 50% of sales leaders believe that sales enablement will support customer-facing teams in the next three years, and a sales enablement strategy will make that happen.
For example, when IBM implemented its robust sales enablement strategy, which involved measuring KPIs, promoting collaboration between teams, offering employee learning opportunities, etc., it achieved a 10% increase in sales reps' productivity and a 73% reduction in the sales cycle, leading to more profit for the business.
Components of a Successful Sales Enablement Strategy
Here’s what makes up a foolproof sales enablement strategy:
Content Management
Your sales team typically handles three stages of the buyer journey for each customer/prospect—awareness, consideration, and decision—and they need sales content aligned to each of these stages and personalized for each prospect. That’s a lot of sales assets, and if not managed well, it would be difficult to access, leaving most unused.
Also, reps spend a lot of time on non-selling activities like searching for the right content to use.
Content management ensures that all sales content is organized in a central repository and easily accessible by sales reps. You can categorize content by content type (article, blog posts, webinar, etc.), buyer journey, or sales cycle stage, making it faster for reps to find what they need when needed.
Some sales enablement software, like Spekit, have content management tools that will help you simplify your sales content management with content creation, sharing, and tracking features.
Training and Coaching
Regardless of how tight your sales enablement strategy is, it will be useless if your sales reps are not given training and coaching opportunities that help them execute the strategy. For example, if you implement sales enablement software to optimize access to sales content, but your reps aren’t given adequate training on using the software, they won’t adopt it.
More important is reinforcement learning. 84% of sales training is usually forgotten within three months of learning. To check knowledge retention and also help reps brush up on skills they’ve forgotten, you should build a continuous learning culture through reinforcement learning.
On Spekit’s centralized platform, you can reinforce sales training right where and when your sales reps need it and help with Speks—bite-sized, easily digestible training and answers to questions reps might have. Enable your reps to accelerate deals through the funnel with real-time coaching and support.
Technology and Tools
Sales enablement software and tools make everything easier. Imagine automating sales content delivery to a prospect or delivering sales training right in your reps' workflow. With the right tech stack, you can achieve this.
Your tech stack should comprise tools like a sales Content Management System (CRM), knowledge base, Learning Management System (LMS) analytics and reporting, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software, and any other software that will streamline manual sales tasks and enable reps to sell better.
For example, with Spekit’s knowledge base, you can create a one-stop shop for the information your reps need to succeed. You can embed sales resources in the tools your reps use, enable your reps with in-context search and recommendations, and leverage easy-to-read dashboards to identify sales assets that need to be refreshed before they’re sent out to prospects.
Analytics and Optimization
As with any strategy; your sales enablement strategy should have metrics you use to measure whether it's being implemented successfully. Analyzing those metrics helps you measure performance and determine what iterations must be made.
B2B sales leaders believe that analyzing metrics increases sales enablement success. No strategy is foolproof initially, but optimizing and perfecting it becomes effortless when you constantly track strategy implementation and measure it against defined KPIs.
How to Develop a Sales Enablement Strategy
Now that you know the components of a successful strategy, let’s see the best practices to help you develop one:
1. Identify sales goals and objectives
Before developing a sales enablement strategy, you should determine and break your goals into objectives. This gives you a clear overview of what you’re working towards and how to tie your enablement strategy into it.
Tip: Make sure to write down your goals. Research shows people are more likely to achieve goals just by writing them down.
2. Assess current sales processes and materials
To reach your sales enablement goal, you must assess your current state. Are your current sales processes and materials good, and could they be better?
After establishing your sales goals and objectives, it’s easier to determine whether your current sales processes match your goals. You should adjust any process not contributing to your end goals and audit sales materials to optimize sales content usage and ensure customers get content that addresses their pain points.
3. Align your sales and marketing teams
In many businesses, there is a disconnect between sales and marketing teams. Marketing often creates sales materials that sales might not need, and sales teams don’t even know how to use the materials given to them.
High-performing businesses have aligned sales and marketing. When both teams are aligned, they don’t work as separate teams but as a single revenue enablement team trying to achieve the same goal.
Aligned sales and marketing teams report 3x more revenue. Use Spekit to bridge the disconnect between your sales and marketing team by enabling marketing to automatically feed sales reps with up-to-date, important, relevant messaging and resources.
4. Develop a sales enablement content strategy aligned with pipeline stages
A sales pipeline is the stages a prospect goes through as they interact with your business and sales team. For each stage, a prospect needs personalized content designed to move them closer to the purchase decision. Your sales enablement content strategy should be aligned with the pipeline stages.
For example, at the prospecting stage, you should have blog posts highlighting common pain points your prospects deal with and how they can be solved. In the next stage—lead nurturing, you should design case studies showing how your product can solve their problems.
5. Use sales enablement software
Sales enablement software can help streamline your sales enablement strategy by giving you access to tools for creating sales content, collaboration, CRM integration, analytics, alternative CMS platforms, etc.
Use sales enablement software like Spekit to provide enablement in your rep's flow of work and help them stay organized and sell better with tools like:
- Knowledge and enablement: A centralized platform to onboard, train, and coach reps without disrupting their productivity
- Sales content management: Enable reps to find, share, and track sales content with buyers easily
- SpekitAI: An AI-powered content creation assistant to help you create sales content in seconds
- Integrations: Embed Spekit in daily tools reps work with to enable them to access everything they need while on a work platform like Slack
- Spotlights: Trigger in-app alerts to notify sales and marketing teams of changes and updates
- Knowledge checks: Assess rep’s knowledge retention with short in-app quizzes
- Analytics: Prove the effectiveness of your sales enablement strategy with built0in analytics and data visualizations
6. Create training and coaching plans
Your sales team will implement your sales enablement strategy daily, so they should be equipped with training and coaching that helps them effectively use the strategy. If you’re going to integrate new tools, offer walkthrough training, and if you want to enable your reps to engage customers better, create coaching programs where you offer one-on-one customer engagement and negotiation coaching to your reps.
How to Customize Your Enablement Strategy to Your Business
Your sales enablement strategy needs to be customized to your business structure. Here’s how you can do that:
Industry-specific Considerations
Before developing an enablement strategy, you should do adequate research on the industry you operate in to understand regulatory requirements, market dynamics, current trends, etc. This way, you can understand prospects' customer journeys in your industry and map out a strategy that addresses their pain points and provides actionable solutions.
For example, if you operate in a highly regulated industry, you must include educating sales reps about compliance requirements in your strategy so prospects get personalized pitches.
Company Size
Your sales enablement strategy should be tailored to your company's unique needs while being flexible enough to scale or be downsized. This ensures you give your teams what they need without wasting money or resources. Let’s say you run a small B2B company and want to integrate a CRM.
You should go for an open-source platform that lets you pay per user. This way, you’re incurring less upfront costs and only paying for the size of your team.
Sales Team Structure
A standard sales team is structured hierarchically, with top-to-bottom roles like sales directors, managers, and representatives. Each role has its own responsibility when it comes to engaging customers.
For example, sales reps might be responsible for lead generation, while sales managers handle customer relationships. However, sales teams are unique to businesses. Some of these roles might not exist in your business, while others do. You should understand your sales team's structure and assign sales enablement tasks based on that structure.
More about Sales Enablement Strategy
Other information you should know about sales enablement strategy:
What is the main goal of sales enablement?
The main goal of sales enablement is to give prospects or customers a personalized buying experience that drives customer loyalty. This can be done by giving sales reps all the resources, tools, and help they need to engage prospects in productive conversations and sell personalized services to them.
What are the pillars of sales enablement?
Sales enablement has three pillars: sales content management, training and coaching, and a sales enablement tech stack. Sales content management ensures that all the content needed to convince buyers to make a purchase is available to sales reps, while sales training/coaching ensures your reps have relevant industry skills to use that sales content to convince prospects.
A sales enablement tech stack ties everything together by enabling you with a platform for managing sales content and training.
How can sales and marketing teams collaborate to enhance sales enablement?
Cross-functional collaboration between sales and marketing teams can enhance sales enablement. Since both teams are revenue enablement teams, you should encourage them to work together frequently and even swap roles so that there’s a complete understanding of what each team needs to do for successful sales enablement.
Create a Winning Sales Enablement Strategy
If you’ve already figured out the tools, content, and resources that you want to enable your sales team with but are finding it hard to come up with a strategy that helps you enable them in the best way, the first thing you should do is adopt a sales enablement software.
An enablement software would serve as a centralized hub for every other thing you do. You can create and store sales content on one, onboard and train reps, and monitor the effectiveness of your strategy.
With sales enablement software like Spekit, you won’t have to worry about figuring out manual processes of the strategy, like how to create content and make it accessible to sales reps or how to deliver training programs to reps in a way that improves knowledge retention.
Spekit provides a content management system supported by generative AI to help you create sales content in seconds and deliver it to the platforms your sales reps are working on. It also offers an LMS with pre-built courses, playbooks, and guides to upskill reps.
Even better, Spekit's platform has robust integration that allows you to connect all the tools your reps work with. You can integrate Slack, Salesforce, and other enablement software in their workflow. Want to see how Spekit can help you create a winning sales enablement strategy?
